Watchtower Statistics Explorer

Use the data

This dataset is free for anyone to use — research, journalism, activism, your own channel. No attribution required, though a link back is appreciated.

• wt_stats.csv — every country, every year, every metric
• wt_stats_world.csv — the worldwide series, with Watchtower's official totals alongside the sum of named countries
• wt_stats.json — the same data as JSON

How to read it

A gap is not a zero.

Where Watchtower did not publish a figure, the line breaks. It never drops to zero, because “not reported” and “none” are different facts.

Hours stop.

Hours were published per country through the Yearbook era and then dropped. In late 2023 Watchtower stopped requiring publishers to report hours at all. The gap in that series is the story, not an error in the data.

Worldwide totals are Watchtower's own.

The worldwide line uses the published Grand Total. Adding up the named countries gives a lower number, because each report folds small territories into an “N Other Lands” row.

One figure is inferred. It is marked.

Two cases, both flagged. Where Watchtower published a country's publisher averages but not its percentage increase, the percentage is worked out the same way Watchtower does — this year's average against last year's. And from the 2017 report on, a blank percentage cell means no change rather than no figure: Watchtower prints the column as whole numbers and leaves it empty instead of typing a zero. In 2019 the blank rows moved by a median of 0.13%, against 1.62% for the rows it did fill in. Those points carry an asterisk in the chart readout and a pct_increase_derived flag in the CSV and JSON, so they can be excluded. Nothing else in the dataset is computed, and no published figure is ever replaced by a calculated one.

Country names change.

Historical renames are merged so a country can be followed across the whole period (Zaire → DR Congo, Swaziland → Eswatini, British Isles → Britain). The name as originally printed is preserved in the CSV.